


A Flower Blooming

by Ardwynna



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Angst, F/F, Falling In Love, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7623460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardwynna/pseuds/Ardwynna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jessie found a flower in the slums. It took some searching but eventually Tifa found one too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Flower Blooming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Up_sideand_down](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Up_sideand_down/gifts).



One day Jessie brought a flower home. Not a rose or an orchid, nothing so fanciful or elaborate. But it was beautiful. A long-stemmed white lily, Tifa wasn’t sure what kind, creamy pale and perfumed like a summer day in the fields beyond the borders of an old mountain town. 

“The hell you spending money on flowers, woman,” Barret said. “We need explosive charges.”

“I bought it out of my own cut,” Jessie said, putting the flower in an old beer bottle, the closest thing to a vase they had on hand. “Besides, it was just one gil.”

“One gil,” Tifa said, still staring at the flower. 

“Yeah, I got it off a cart,” Jessie said, and they both stared at the flower and ignored Barret’s fuming.

-.-.-.-.-.-

The flower lasted a long time. It grew sepia and dry, frozen in form and heightened in fragility. Its soft perfume deepened with age, growing honeyed, then musky, then fading to nothing at all. Tifa put the flower on a high shelf to admire it from a distance, and thought of keeping the worn out bloom as a sort of dried arrangement. But one careless night of Biggs and Wedge playing beer pong and the flower began to crumble and crack. Jessie had already relinquished it to Tifa’s charge, forgetting about it as the color leached away to leave nothing but the dusty shades of Midgar. Tifa laid the poor thing to rest in the dirt behind Seventh Heaven.

She kept an eye out for the flower cart after that, to bring a flower home as a surprise for Jessie this time. She almost asked the girl where the cart had been, but she didn’t want to seem too eager, or ruin the surprise. And then Jessie was a city girl, born and raised. The flower had been a whim, an affordable luxury, nothing more. As a gift in the reverse it might not have the same effect. Some days Tifa looked at the metal shell that passed for sky and still felt the call of the mountain in her blood. She hoped she could make the others understand. 

One day, when a couple months had passed, and they were stripping off their smokey, blood-spattered gear into the laundry, Tifa dared to mention it. “Really could use a whiff of that flower you brought home that one time. We stink.”

“Do we ever,” Jessie said, wrangling her sports bra free from her hair. “Haven’t seen the cart again though. Don’t know what happened to it.”

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Tifa grew used to keeping an eye out for the flower cart. She didn’t notice the extra effort anymore. She never did find the cart but one day she found a Cloud. Her Cloud. At least, she was pretty sure he was. He was taller and quieter, and he could see in the dark. And finding him, she stopped looking for anything else. Cloud smelled like rain on the rocks and acted as firm as the Nibel mountain, and it wasn’t Cloud exactly as she remembered him, but it had been so long. He had changed, because she had changed, and they each had a piece of home back and that was enough. And just as soon as she found him, he dropped out her life again. She was sure it was for good.

By some miracle he found her, only this time he brought a friend. A friend who looked like a rose and smelled like a summer day in green fields. Tifa tried not to be jealous of Cloud for finding her first.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

The dry, cracked earth stretched out before them, giving way to green. The sky still gloomed grey above. Jessie was gone. Biggs and Wedge were gone. Jessie and Biggs and Wedge were gone, and with them, all chances of anything more. All Tifa had left was an old friend who wasn’t himself and a girl who smelled like something that hurt too much to recall. At least, Tifa supposed, she had someone to talk to.

They didn’t. At least not about anything Tifa really wanted to ask. She had never really been good at that. But there were things she was good at. Fighting off muggers and robbers on the plains for one. Aerith struggled with that in her long dress. 

“Got your potion back,” Tifa said, breathless but not from the fight. 

“Thanks.” The smile was real and up close Aerith smelled like a memory. She didn’t notice how Tifa stared. “It would be easier to carry all this if I had my basket,” she said. 

“Baskets are good for shopping.” It was one of Tifa’s more brilliant conversational gambits. 

“Oh, I don’t shop with it,” Aerith said. “I sell my flowers out of it.”

The habit Tifa had only just forgotten reared up again. “Flowers? In Midgar?”

“Mmhmm,” Aerith said, and as they walked she stretched her hands up to the blue sky. “I used to have a cart but it broke.”

-.-.-.-.-.-

The Planet giveth and the Planet taketh away, and Jessie had brought a flower into her life and gone just in time for the flower to take her place. Tifa watched Aerith bloom under the sun and stars, content to be in her presence and enjoy the scent of a mountain summer.

Aerith was having none of that. “Uh-uh, no hanging back, let’s check this out together,” she said, grabbing Tifa by the hand. They raced down the shopping districts of Kalm, checking all the stalls and shops in the cobblestoned streets. Midgar had nothing like this. Nibelheim hadn’t either. But Midgar had hid, all these years, a girl who looked like softness incarnate, but had worn hands and silky hair and three times Tifa’s spark. Tifa ran with her into shoe stores and ribbon racks. They browsed fruit stands and tea stalls and one small outlet selling goldfish in plastic bags. “My old cart looked something like that,” Aerith said, and then they tried on hats and scarves until Barret rang to tell them to come back.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Sometimes Tifa wanted to ask Aerith if she remembered. Did she remember selling a flower to a girl with a short ponytail, and more than likely some soot on her cheek? But sometimes at night, Aerith would get a strange distant look on her face, and her head would tilt as she ran a cheap comb through brown tresses, and she looked so lost in memory Tifa was afraid she might not come back. Tifa never asked. Not about that.

-.-.-.-.-.-

“How come you never got your cart fixed?” she managed to ask one day. They were bathing in the woods, separated from any possible prying eyes.

Aerith sank deeper among the river rushes. “I was keeping it for my boyfriend to fix. He built it.”

“Oh,” Tifa said. “Taking his sweet time getting around to it, huh?”

Aerith sighed and picked at a cattail. “Yeah, five years.”

Tifa didn’t ask any more about that either.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

They ran wild in Junon Harbor. Tifa showed some cleavage and Aerith flashed some leg and the poor young trooper guarding the elevator let them ride up into town without protest, too busy trying to hide the boner in his pants. In the port town, Aerith turned up the charm and got them each a free beer, which turned out to be her first. “Just never got around to it before,” she said, screwing up her face and finishing the drink anyway.

They helped each other into blue uniforms that didn’t button properly over the chest, or were too loose around the waist, and coiled each other’s hair to fit under helmets. It wasn’t wires and plastique but it was a mission all the same, and Tifa had missed that. When the crossing was over, there would be hot showers and shampoo, and new food to try. 

Aerith looked good in those too-big pants.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

For all the laughter and exploring, Aerith didn’t talk much about herself. So when out of the blue she let something slip, Tifa was surprised, but wouldn’t let it show.

“You can’t be certain. He might still come back.”

Aerith shook her head and sank into her sleeping bag. “No. He won’t. He can’t.”

“I see,” Tifa said, although she didn’t feel like she did. “Shinra?” It was a safe bet. Shinra was behind most things.

“Most likely,” Aerith said, and rolled over in the bag, feigning sleep, leaving Tifa alone in the dark to think of broken carts and might-have-beens.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Flowers wilt. Flowers fade. Flowers decay. And sometimes when Aerith thought no one was watching, Tifa could see hints of Midgar beneath her skin. It was in the hard set of her jaw after they met the Turks in the shimmering caves. In the quiet, seething rage that marred their swim after Hojo refused to acknowledge her name. And in her eyes now, as she sat in a circle on a rocky plateau, staring at a bonfire that had never gone out. Tifa thought of the lily in its beer bottle vase, brittle, breaking.

What Cloud said to the girl, Tifa didn’t know, but Aerith showed no change. It was presumption to think she could do better herself, but a friend would try. Jessie would have. 

“Hey,” she said, sitting close. “How’s it going?”

Aerith sighed. “It’s been better.” And Tifa knew that feeling so she stared into the fire too.

“I thought I’d find others like me,” Aerith said, “if I ever got out of Midgar. I thought they were hiding very far away, and the city was too dead for me to hear.” 

“There’s… no one?”

“No.”

Tifa sighed. “One more.” Aerith glanced at her. “One more family gone because of them.” 

Aerith nodded. One hand, garden-roughed, slid out of her lap into the space that lay between them. Tifa thought it would be polite to shift away, but she stayed. Aerith spoke, eyes never leaving the bonfire. “Do you see old things? In the fire.”

Tifa swallowed, Aerith’s pretty hands forgotten. “Sometimes. And the not-so-old things too. Biggs, and Wedge. And Jessie.”

“Your Avalanche friends.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” 

Tifa stretched her legs out before her and leaned back, looking up at the sky so gathering tears would not fall. “It’s hard to believe,” she said, “that it was just the other day.”

“And even when it’s not,” Aeris said, sounding choked up on her own, “it still feels like it.”

Tifa nodded. Aerith’s hand brushed her, straying over the rock in a pattern of idleness. Tifa blinked and swallowed and crossed one ankle over the other, anything to avoid looking Aerith in the eye. “I miss Jessie the most,” she said, using one to forget the other, just as she had been doing this whole time. “The girl talk, you know.”

“Not really,” Aerith said. Tifa saw the flutter of her eyelashes as she closed her eyes against the falling night. “I never had a girlfriend, Tifa.”

Tifa breathed deep and tried not to read too much into it. “Do you want one?”

Aerith’s long fingers crossed the gap and rested with definitive sureness on Tifa’s gloved hand. “Yes.”


End file.
